For more than 20 years, Jensen Gardens has serviced the Omaha, Neb. area. The company does landscape design, construction, pool installations and also does commercial landscape, maintenance and snow removal.
With roughly 90 employees, the company describes itself as a “medium-sized company with a big impact.” Thinking about that motto, Nick Jensen, vice president, wanted to add a charitable program to the company’s other philanthropic efforts that would involve his crews and raise awareness of what good deed they were doing — to create an ownership of the good deed. That’s when he came up with the Charity of the Month idea.
The concept is simple: Every month, Jensen Gardens donates $250 to a charitable cause. The cause is chosen by a vote; the winner is the crew that gets the most votes for working above and beyond their normal role.
“You can’t vote for yourself, but you can vote for the other crews who you’ve observed going out of their way,” Jensen says. “Usually it’s kind of … ‘These guys stayed late and helped us out,’ or, ‘They had a difficult customer but were still able to get a positive review.’ We have a committee that reviews the nominations and then decides on the winner.”
The reward is the crew gets to choose which charitable cause they’d like to support with that $250 donation.
“We could take that crew to lunch, but this is something that resonates with the guys — they don’t have the cash to donate to something they’re passionate about,” Jensen says. “We’re not donating a ton of money, but we want the crew to know that they did something good, and the community is going to benefit.”
Jensen says the most popular cause has been the Our Lady of Guadalupe church. Jensen Gardens has a large community of Hispanic employees, and the Our Lady of Guadalupe is the church many of their employees go to, but there have been many other organizations that have come up. The Ronald McDonald House, the Nebraska Humane Society and even a GoFundMe campaign have all been selected.
“If I pick it every month, it’s going to be the charitable cause that I align with,” Jensen says. “You’re mixing charitable work with a competition at work. If we take someone to lunch, that’s kind of boring. When they asked me if they could do the GoFundMe, I said, ‘It’s your money. Donate it however you want to.’ The guys like to spread it out; it makes it fun.”
Jensen Gardens has been making this charitable donation for the last four years, and they learned something early on: Some of the causes were caught off guard by the check. Now, Jensen is sure to include a note explaining who they are and why they’re receiving the money.
“Some of these organizations would get a check from us, and they’d say, ‘What is this check for? What do we do with it?’” Jensen says. “I said, ‘Gosh, I don’t care, we just want to recognize our employees.’ And that’s made everyone feel like it’s a reward not just for the employees, but also for our local community.”
